Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies on category construction have shown that people have a strong bias of creating categories based only on a single dimension. Ahn and Medin (1989) have developed a two-stage model of category construction to explain why we have categories structured on the basis of overall similarity of members in spite of this bias. The current study investigates effects of background knowledge on category construction. The results showed that people created family resemblance categories more frequently when they had a priori knowledge on prototypes of potential family resemblance categories. It was also found that people created family resemblance categories much more frequently when they had knowledge on underlying dimensions which integrated surface features of examples. H o w the two-stage model should be extended is discussed.